Wow, I was just watching on the news a bunch of municipal workers clearing out a squalid homeless encampment somewhere in the South Bay. Apparently, conditions are getting so unsanitary that dread diseases are rampaging through the ‘housing deficient’ community.

Visiting Santa Cruz, I was amazed to see the sprawling tent cities all around downtown, apparently being managed by local authorities who provide porta-potties and try to fence off the larger clusters of tents along the walkways by the river. It must be pretty miserable there when it’s raining. Locally, I have heard that Mendo holds the dubious distinction of having the second highest homeless rate of any US county.

While the scope of the nation’s homeless problem is self-evident, politicians and the mainstream media are constantly crowing about the record low ‘unemployment rate’, never informing us of their definition of that term; one is not officially considered unemployed unless one is receiving unemployment benefits! Therefore, none of our local denizens of culverts and bridges, though they may be clearly lacking employment, are counted among the unemployed.

I remember back in the 70s, when I arrived in our bucolic County, that the national economy was in one of its periodic downturns. In those days the federal government, for all its flaws, at least pretended to give a damn about something other than stuffing it’s people’s blood and treasure into the already morbidly bloated war machine and giving more money to those who already have more of it than they know what to do with. Back then they had something they called ‘revenue sharing’, where some federal monies were given back to local governments for the creation of so-called ‘make work’ programs when the economy found itself in the doldrums.

New to town with no local work contacts, I was delighted to land a CETA-funded job pouring concrete sidewalks all around Ukiah. At about the same time, some kind of federal loans funded a major overhaul of the old Palace Hotel. Many of the young folks who worked on those projects went on to become local builders and contractors; tradespeople who build homes, pay taxes and who basically created the Mendo we live in today. Whatever tax money was expended in the creation of those ‘make work’ jobs can hardly amount to a rounding error when you consider all the wealth created by all of those productive members of society since that time. Who knows what kind of creativity and productive potential we will be missing out on by no longer availing our young folks that first leg up to a fulfilling life as a contributing member of the community?

Why is it that in so many areas, common sense seems to have been banished from the regulatory arena? While the need for more housing, especially simple, inexpensive housing is so obviously dire, every year it seems like additional regulations, permits and restrictions of all sorts get added to the process of creating shelter. Mendocino County has, for generations, been at the vanguard of a movement to find self-reliant, sustainable, low eco-impact ways to live, and a big part of those efforts have been innovative methods of building construction, we pioneered the legalization of such things as using recycled lumber, straw bale construction etc., which were institutionalized by the passage, decades ago, of Class K, which has provided owner-builders with considerably more leeway in construction techniques and materials than is allowed under the regular uniform building code.

Unfortunately, despite the fact that there have never been any problems with Class K construction, it is currently under attack by control-obsessed bureaucrats who wish to ‘modernize’ it basically out of existence. Unbelievably, at the same time as many County officials decry the lack of affordable housing, they are trying to push through a change in class K mandating interior sprinkler systems, which will add many thousands of dollars to the cost of each new home, while doing nothing to protect that house from wildfire.

Many of the most well constructed, fire safe, highest quality homes that I know of have been built without the blessings of the building department; I have seen some of these fine homeowner/builders, tempted by the amnesty that had been offered recently, to look seriously into ‘getting legal’, only to forget about it after hearing about the inflexible, draconian demands being imposed on those souls who have invited the scrutiny of an inspector class utterly unconcerned with whether their requirements result in complete economic ruin for the applicant.

On top of the dearth of common sense we see that any innate sense of the common good, of doing the best thing for the most people, seems to have been almost completely bred out of most Americans, perhaps a result of several generations of constant and ubiquitous propaganda glorifying the mythical rugged individual who is somehow able to perform all kinds of miracles all my himself. A corollary of this is the tunnel vision that seems to afflict so many in positions of power; focusing only on their own tiny area of authority, while completely disregarding other, perhaps more significant, impacts.